SEO Test Shows Adding Links to Nearby Locations Had a 7% Improvement in Ranking

The particular website this test relates to has around 8,000 ‘regional’ pages across the USA, each of which lists the nearby physical company locations in that geographic area. Before the test began, some of these pages received internal links via breadcrumbs from the individual location pages, and some other sporadic links around the site, but there was no systematic internal linking in place.

To improve the internal linking, and therefore the distribution of link equity around these pages (and hopefully the pages’ organic search performance), we decided to test adding links from each regional page to the six nearest neighbouring regional pages. We wanted to run a controlled test, so instead of linking to all 8,000 pages, we first split them into two groups (control and variant), and only linked to the six closest pages within the variant group.

The test resulted in 7% uplift in organic traffic to the variant pages.